Clayton Christensen Quotes

With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.

I'm hard-pressed to think of companies that don't need venture capital that are going after big opportunities. I think, in almost all cases, if they're going after big opportunities, they are going to need to raise quite a bit of money.

Learn to raise capital by any means necessary. That's your primary job as an entrepreneur. You must continually raise capital from family and friends, banks, suppliers, customers and investors.

Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.

I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.

You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.

We have to develop the whole system of early stage investors and a tax system around it. For every Google that has come on the scene, there are hundred entrepreneurs who never did.

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'

I would say raising capital is one of the weakest things for most entrepreneurs.

When you look at how technology companies are funded, it's not a zero-sum game. It could be 20 investors in one company, and everybody has to work together for the benefit of that company.

Most startup entrepreneurs unnecessarily spend half their time and give up half their equity in search of funding from angel investors and venture capitalists. Tens of millions of dollars are available to them for free from partners who not only don't want their equity, they don't even want to be paid back.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

If you're a teenager in Palo Alto launching an app, you know from the outset how you plan to finance your business.

There aren't many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It's pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

I'm just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.

I don't think a lot of people have been entrepreneurial about venture capital.

Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.

I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.

Venture capital is debt. People don't understand that.

Our main funders... a lot of them are entrepreneurs and technologists themselves as well and familiar with iterative development processes.

State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors.